1. Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

2. It's more useful to think about state when deciding when to animate. Could the user have trouble perceiving the change in state that just occurred? If so, then use an animation to help them visualize what happened. I believe this is the primary reason to use an animation - all others are vanity.

That's just one example because it just happened, but this happens ALL the time. I know Apple can do better. My Android phone felt so much more responsive (the 120hz screen helped, I'm sure), simply because the animations were snappier.

Other examples that come to mind real quick:

- Swiping up to switch apps. That one is awfully slow. (Actually, most gesture-based activities are painfully slow!)

- Dismissing notifications (esp. on Mac)

- Opening the drawer thing

- Revealing the dock

- Sometimes I see animations stacked upon each other. One animation has to fully complete, then another one, THEN I can finally use my computer again.

It's ironic that I have to go to Accessibility settings and disable these things to make my device accessible.

Anything longer than that I consider too slow.

That might be the designers intent, but that's not what it does for me at all. First, the animation shown is on some weird 3D angle which is not part of any sane UI. Why is that? Not to convey anything about the actual experience of the app shown. That 3d look certainly does not "help the user understand what this feature does"

The fade-in of the animation seems to draw me in to that area of the page which I assume is the intent. The 3D perspective helps me understand that the text in that box is not part of the page I'm reading, but a view of something else - their product. But it doesn't really help me to understand the product.

And, always provide an accessibility option to turn off all animations.

MacBook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UjJnxobPlBh_nv18Ych0XHwHEMw...

Crappy Monitor: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jtwJKIFvteLOWD1Pzj1mTZjQwVX...

Indeed, just like the immediately following example, which slows down page scrolling, breaking predictability and consistency of one of the most frequently used and fundamental page operations

And its purpose is, of course, only fulfilled in the imagination of the designer

> This animation explains how Product Intelligence (Linear’s feature) works. We could have used a static asset, but the animated version helps the user understand what this feature does, straight in the initial viewport of the page.

It doesn't really do that: first, it's happening partially out of focus because I read top to bottom, so I'm still reading your title and leading paragraph, or did you want me to be distracted and skip the text? So I see the same thing on first focus: static image. And I can't rewind it to watch again since I missed it the first time.

Then it has a very weird angle which makes all the text harder to read, my guess is to help see the 3D nature of the animation when to show the arrival of the product as a separate overlay? So this would likely not exist in a static image and be an improvement.

> To give you an example, a faster-spinning spinner makes the app seem to load faster, even though the load time is the same. This improves perceived performance.

Perhaps due to poor design by companies that abuse the fast loading spinner when, in fact, nothing is happening, I instinctively trusted the slower spinner more.

Designers either don't use their own products, or have no taste (possibly both).

For example - I think it's on Windows where I keep running into this - on notification popups from some apps, you can't click "X" to close until sufficient time has passed after the popup animation. If you try to close it in that time, it instead acts as if you clicked the notification to open it. Super annoying.

Another, on Mac, when switching desktops, sometimes an app will show on the screen briefly before flashing to another app. The animation is slow enough that it often tricks me into thinking it's ok to do stuff and then nope the app changes. Even worse, I think it occurs randomly.

Note to designers: if you do choose to include an animation, it better be the most rock solid implementation ever or I will immediately think you're a twat and your app is a buggy pile of crap.

This means, if you turned animations off you would still work as fast and understand the flow the same as if animations were enabled.

For me, the purpose of animations is to soften the UX journey, and to confirm what I already knew, by giving me small indications that yes, the UI is truly in the state I expect it to be.

Such as fast highlighting of on hover items, so I don't have to correlate the mouse position to the control.

I love that example of tool tip popups taking 0ms once you have popped up one, that is a clear signal that the UX understands you are trying to learn more about the controls you're hovering over.

That's a perfect representation of how animations signal understanding of your UX journey.

I appreciate subtle animations like the button press. Visual feedback gives me confidence in UI actions and makes things less jarring. Same idea with CSS smooth scroll.

But a lot of this feels subjective. Anybody have user studies on the effectiveness of UI animation?

Also, I think a lot of people would be happier if web apps exposed settings like zero animation / mild animation/ full animation. Power users could speed up their workflows by turning off animations. Kinda like my phone UI settings.

I have a blog post draft called, “5 principals of interactive animation” aping the “12 principles of animation” from the 80's that I thought every would-be UX designer might learn from. It mirrors a lot from this post!

1. Purpose over ornament.

2. The more often, the less.

3. Timing shapes perception.

4. Motion adapts to state.

5. Silence is an option.

When you're the only person using the computer, UI animations are pure time-wasting anti-features. You obviously know how the UI state changed because you're the one who requested the change. If the UI state changed without your explicit request, that's a bug that needs fixing. But somebody viewing your screen remotely can't see which keys you're pressing, and they don't know what you intend to click on before you've actually clicked it, so to them UI state changes can be surprising. Animations can help them follow what's happening.

Of course, animations should be disabled by default, because most computer use is not performed for an audience, but having the option to enable them is occasionally useful.

Every time you want to type in a product by name, you must endure a 2 second slide-in of the keyboard before you can start typing on it. It's so slow that I feel that I could have completed the search and started on the next item before it's even done animating, if there was a way to disable it.

I sincerely hope employees don't have to use systems like this all day that reduce their throughout by more than half.

Since the website had been around for a very long time, I wonder how many millions of seconds had been wasted on this animation to complete.

> When done right, animations make an interface feel predictable, [...]

Predictable how? If you anticipate the animation, then you will have predicted it. But you also could anticipate the lack of an animation, and you will have predicated that.

> When done right, animations make an interface feel [...] faster,

Do they make the interface feel faster because no transition ever occurs in less time than the animation? Or is it that literal motion on the screen tricks us into thinking something is "going fast"? A nearly instantaneous, unanimated change in view must feel faster than an animation, no?

> When done right, animations make an interface [...] more enjoyable to use. [...]

This is true sometimes. It's particularly true when you're interacting with controls that have a "real physical world" analogy, like buttons, sliders, and page flips. On the other hand, if I click a button and a bunch of sparkles happen, that's not enjoyable to me.

> When done right, animations [...] help you and your product stand out.

If your product has animations and competing products do not, then yours stands out insofar that it has animations.

> But they can also do the opposite. [...]

Correct!

> So how do you know when and how to animate to improve the experience?

> Step one is making sure your animations have a purpose.

Or... don't use animations unless the app involves animation. Or do, there's nothing I can do about it.

The UI should learn the user's patterns: when they're new and unfamiliar, the animations are slower and more deliberate, instructional (initially including more information re: expected workflow). As the user "walks" a certain path again and again, every time more smoothly and confidently, the suggestions / assists / animations diminish, shorten, and disappear. For a pro user with muscle memory and memorized keystroke sequences, the UI does its best to just get out of the way.

That's the reason why I removed every animation in GNOME on my desktop. I also removed anything that morphs the screen into something else. For example, I don't use the activities screen. I jump to the other virtual desktops with hotkeys.

I wonder if this leads experienced users of the app in question to not like any animations, because they know click paths better and place their focus in an anticipatory manner.

Maybe one could measure click speed and reduce animation times based on that.

Luckily Android has a developer option to double the speed of animations system-wide. It's the first thing I turn on every time I get a new phone. I find that double speed is about right. Designers tend to make every animation at least half as fast as it should be, to make sure you notice their effort.

I'm asking myself the question of fundamentally why UI designers are making decisions to include the, "tasteful delay" and its ultimately as the article points out prioritizing, "delightful presentations" for, "tools that ultimately serve the users purposes most effectively." I don't think I have to preach to a converted choir here about that but I'm reminded of Thorstein Veblen's famous book and I wonder; at a deeper level isn't misanthropic to reduce software to, "tools?" Lumiere created motion pictures and we told stories. We invented the interactive motion picture and we jerry-rigged into an automated office suite. Outside of the very sexy Alan Kay-Dan Ingalls fringe computer interfaces of all stripes descended from that very idiosyncratic paradigm.

I wonder what crazy shit Ted Nelson is building with Claude right now. Sweet fuck.

https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/theoryleisureclass.pdf

If you haven't watched the Half Life documentary, I can't recommend it enough. In it Gabe Newell talks about the way he wanted the game to be different from games that came before it in that you could interact with things around you so you felt like you were actually in with and interacting with this world. He then related it to a psychological concept (maybe associated with self realization or external validation) and how as humans we crave the kind of physical objective feedback as recognition of our existence and how important and valuable that is. Really a neat idea and whether or not the science is sound, there is something immensely satisfying about interacting with virtual objects and having them respond in a physical manner that replicates physical reality.

I find the button I need to press. I press it. The button animates to show it recognizes my action, but nothing else happens. I press it again and it works normally.

I really hate that.

Sorry for this rant, but hell, the web, the apps, everything is so sloooow and bloated. Make it instant! I just want to do my things, not to wait for drawings to draw!

I already foresee a lot of people jumping on me for this, so do your worst, nerds.